An AMD-led team has set a new Guinness World Record for the “Highest Frequency of a Computer Processor” by cranking up a soon-to-be-released chip to 8.429GHz. Pause for a nanosecond to let that number sink in: that’s eight billion, four hundred twenty-nine million cycles per second.
What is it about guys? Give them something fast and their immediate impulse is to make it faster.
In this case, the fast thing is an eight-core AMD FX processor, codenamed Zambezi and scheduled for release soon—likely by the time you read this. As I write these words on my 1.4GHz MacBook Air, AMD hadn’t yet released the Zambezi line’s base clock speeds. The word on the street, however, was that the top-of-the-line part would zip along at around 3.6GHz.
That’s fast, but not fast enough for “Team AMD FX.” These five guys—yes, all guys—went to extremes to boost that chip’s clock up to 8.429GHz. How extreme is extreme? Is chilling the chip down to a few degrees above absolute zero by bathing it in liquid helium extreme enough for you?
To say that liquid helium is cold is like saying that Bill Gates is well off: a gross understatement. The stuff boils at –452.11 degrees Fahrenheit. Absolute zero—the theoretical and unreachable temperature where all molecular motion grinds to a complete halt—is –459.67°F.
Liquid helium is so cold, in fact, that before dumping that cryo-crazy concoction into their cooling pot the team had to first chill the target chip with liquid nitrogen, which boils at a comparatively toasty –320.42°F. In fact, they had to let the liquid nitrogen boil completely away before adding the liquid helium, or the liquid nitrogen would have been turned into nitro-ice.
Sami “Macci” Makinen of Team AMD FX sets up the cooling pot and funnel over the record-setting 8-core AMD FX processor.
Chilling the AMD FX down to near absolute zero did more than merely keep it from overheating when cranked up to ludicrous clock rates. Extremely low temperatures also improve the conductivity of silicon, helping the chip’s transistors to switch on and off at world-record speeds.
When I asked the team’s leader, AMD’s Simon Solotko, exactly how cold those transistors got during the chip’s record-breaking run, he confessed he didn’t know—there are a few thermal gradients between the silicon and the liquid helium churning in the cooling pot above it. His best guess, however, was “somewhere in the vicinity of 10 degrees north of zero K”—that’s zero Kelvin, or absolute zero.
Solotko reminded me that not all chips can be pushed to such extremes. Some will, as he put it, “cold-bug out” when they’re brought down to extraordinarily low temps. Being an AMD man, it was perhaps predictable that he would tell me, as he did, that Intel’s current top-of-the-line chips, codenamed Sandy Bridge, don’t handle extreme cold all that well. “You’ll see the top frequencies in Sandy Bridge in the fives,”
he claims.
But if you happen to have a couple of tanks of liquid nitrogen and helium around your house and you’d like to cryo-crank your Mac to get it to rip DVDs a bit faster, fuhgettaboudit. The overclocked Zambezi was able to stabilize at 8.429GHz for only a few seconds—just long enough to take a clock-watching screenshot to satisfy the Guinness folks.
There are most definitely things to learn about chip architecture, conductivity, and the like by such over-the-top overclocking, but to Solotko and his team the rationale is more direct. “This is an extreme technology sport,” he told me. Sounds like a guy thing to me.
